WordPress 3.1 RC3 Is Available for Download

The third release candidate for the upcoming WordPress 3.1 has released and now available for download.It has released with a few significant changes made since the second Release Candidate, including the removal of AJAX list tables, which introduced too many bugs and usability issues to be considered stable for 3.1.

There are some significant differences from previous versions of 3.1, so please review the changes if you have been developing against a beta or RC version.

The biggest change is the removal of AJAX list tables, which had been an effort to move all of our list-style screens to full AJAX for pagination, searches, and column sorts, and to consolidate the list-style screens into a single API that plugins could leverage. Unfortunately, with more testing came realizations that there were too many major bugs and usability issues with how the functionality was implemented, so we’ve spent the last week rolling back the most important portions of the feature.

* For users: AJAX has been entirely disabled for the list tables. We hope to bring this back again, in a form that is properly and fully implemented, in a future release. Column sorting remains, but everything else has returned to its 3.0 state.
* For developers: The entire list table API is now marked private. If you attempt to leverage new components of the API, you are pretty much guaranteeing that your plugins will break in a future release, so please don’t do that. 🙂 We hope to enable all the fun new goodies for public use in a future release.

This is the only way we could prevent any regressions in functionality and usability from WordPress 3.0 to 3.1. That’s right, users and plugin authors can still do everything you used to be able to do (and a little bit more).

There are good news as well, the latest RC comes with a number of fixes. The author is now properly displayed in the Quick Edit dropdown. Some fixes for theme deletion have been implemented as well as some for pages used for posts.